An All-Purpose Love Letter

A ramble, for you to keep or send

“Love’s Messenger” by Marie Spartali Stillman

I wanted to write you an all-purpose love letter, because I love you and I thought you should know it. It is also for you to send to a friend or other loved one, but we will get to that. Let’s first focus on the idea that I love you.

I promise I haven’t gone totally mad with delusion. I promise I don’t need or even necessarily WANT to talk to you in person, much less write you shitty poetry in my cat’s saliva. I am sure that is somebody’s idea of true love. It is not mine, DO NOT FRET.

The one who loves you is a specific I, not the person whose name is in the byline above - not entirely, anyway. The “I” who has a name and a date of birth and a place of residence – she does not love you, not necessarily. She may like you if she knows you. She may love you if she REALLY knows you, or she may very much not love you, for the same reason. She may have no desire to engage with the part of you that she knows.

And she really does only know a part, no matter her reaction, no matter how she might describe you. Someone who does not wish to bother with you must be respected, but it can be understood by all parties that there are certain qualities you possess that nobody can ever know.

To truly know a person is still a limited act.

There is in me something that loves everything, and this is the something that loves you without limits.

I may love you, but I do not claim to know you. Every human is a mountain. Fellow humans may at most get a good look at a few sides of said mountain, perhaps even its flora and caverns and deep internal rivers, but never all at once. It is impossible to know the totality of a mountain.

We are all of us mountains, staring at one another, trying and failing at omniscience.

The I that is eternal, that is forever, that is at least now – that is the I that loves you. That is the I who thought you might need a love letter.

I love the you that is struggling with a task that seems insurmountable, the everyday thing that is necessary and terrible, or the lifetime thing that requires endless work, one day at a time. I love the you that is awake and I love the you that is asleep. I love the you that is terrified, that is elated, that thinks this is a stupid premise for a piece of writing, that thinks this is just wonderful, really. I love the you that needs to know somebody loves you.

I tried to write this on Valentine’s Day and it didn’t work. For some reason, at a distance from that most glorious celebration of cheap drugstore chocolates in flimsy heart-shaped boxes, I thought I should say these things to you today. There is, you see, a lot of love in me.

Another thing in me, the literal me, the prosaic flesh-bound me: oatmeal. This is not romantic or poetic, but it is true. I had oatmeal this morning. Marvelous thing, oatmeal – bizarre grainy sludge that nevertheless fuels this rapidly-deteriorating forward-motion machine of protein and water.

This contraption starts to lose value as soon as you drive it off the lot, and yet we are expected to maintain it, keep it running fine, without too many creaks and squeaks, to avoid smashing it into another machine and causing harm, and of course, to keep it looking good the whole damn time.

People tell us things about how to keep this body going. Drink endless water daily, if you can get it, and spend extra moments of your one precious life pissing clear and clean. Eat green things, but not those ones, pick those ones instead, because there was this one article about that kind, the good kind, but make sure to cook that kind first, and oh, remember that kind requires massage and acid before anything else. (Don’t we all, sometimes.)

It's a funny life, isn’t it, this one into which you and I and everybody else we know has landed. Sometimes it’s shit, but we got to spend a few years on the planet as both Tina Turner and Beyoncé, and that’s something, isn’t it?

I love the you that relates, and the you that doesn’t.

I love the you that doesn’t like Tina Turner or Beyoncé, even though that you is demonstrably wrong and needs to heal.

I love the you that will never say “I love you” to anyone else or even yourself. Especially yourself.

I love the you that knows it’s bullshit to say you must love yourself completely before you can love another person, and the you that knows it is impossible to love another person without loving yourself at least a tiny bit.

Adoration has its place, but it is not love. Worship has its place, but it is not love. Love is its own secret third thing, and I can’t explain it on Saint Valentine’s Day or Christmas or Eid or Lunar New Year or Sukkot or Holi or any of the feast days or mourning days, nor the ones that are both. Eat your grief and lay your weary body down, stomach tumbling. Pleasant or not, this sensation says you are still alive.

I might be able to get near explaining it in human words on Arbor Day, as I love trees more than anything else that can’t talk back to me. They do talk, of course, but to each other, in their own way, not like the creatures in The Wizard of Oz, which always scared me, or the ones in King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella, which also scared me, or the ones in The Lord of the Rings called Ents, which do not scare me, but which are not actually trees, I fear.

This letter may not be for you. It may be for somebody else entirely! We are all intertwined but we are all separate entities, and isn’t that fantastic?

On the topic of love, I have things for you to tell your friends and/or lovers. You will know which friends and/or lovers to tell. Here they are, for you to send however you wish:

You are the reason I got through that thing, and that thing, and that thing.

You are a blessing, and I don’t even believe in blessings, or in God.

I believe in you and also in God and rest assured you are not my deity but my fellow traveler, my companion, my human kind of miracle.

I was lucky the day I met you, and I will be lucky the day one of us leaves the planet, because that will be a marvelous day of celebration: one of us is free.

When we part, I will miss you, and you will miss me, and maybe we will meet again on the other side, though perhaps there is no other side. If not, I am still honored and delighted I got to spend some time wandering the only side with you.

I love you so much I don’t say it all the time, or ever. I figure you know it.

I don’t need to talk to you often to know that we both care, and that’s as it should be.

If you learn nothing else from me, learn this: I am grateful for you every day of my little life. It’s not the kind of thing some people feel comfortable saying to a friend, and I am some people, but I didn’t say it – some stranger tapping on a keyboard staring out at Lake Michigan said it, after waxing rhapsodic about oatmeal.

We are not really strangers, of course, at least so long as we are here together writing and reading this love letter, but you needn’t explain that to your friend and/or lover.

This letter may be for you and no one else, and if so, I hope you enjoy it or at least tolerate it in between trips to piss out all that water you’re drinking because of that one article. Maybe you’re reading this on the toilet, which is probably where most of my work is best read.

It is a great comfort to like and love someone. It is a greater comfort to know I don’t have to like you to love you, and vice versa. We never have to hug, and probably shouldn’t. I love that!

Some days are a sprint from waking to sleeping and some days, like this love letter, are a ramble. Whatever the speed of your day, may it contain the awareness of love. May you write your own love letter in thought and in deed. May your digestion be smooth, world without end, amen.

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This essay was published in an earlier form on Patreon, where I work out first drafts and experimental work. I’ve got other stuff on Medium, and I’ve published some books. For photos, here’s Instagram. Thanks for being here.